


The Truth Without Lying

by ViaLethe



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Crossover Pairings, F/M, Family Issues, Forbidden Love, Golden Age (Narnia), Secret Relationship, Spare Oom, The Problem of Susan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:48:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26310646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViaLethe/pseuds/ViaLethe
Summary: Susan remembers everything, other than how Jon Snow had gotten in that wardrobe along with them. It's everyone else who's forgotten.
Relationships: Susan Pevensie/Jon Snow
Comments: 18
Kudos: 36
Collections: Narnia Fic Exchange 2020





	1. The Truth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snacky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snacky/gifts).



> For Snacky, who reblogged one tumblr post and got me to write 18k of fic to surround it.

The one thing Susan could never quite recall, in all the endless time that followed, was just how Jon Snow had come to be with them when they went through the wardrobe.

Certainly he’d never been part of their games. It had been something of a surprise to all of them, when they arrived tired and disheveled at Professor Kirke’s huge old house, to find another child already ensconced there; a boy a bit older than Peter, his solitary figure such a contrast of pale white skin and coal black hair that Lucy ran from the sight of him for days, convinced he was a ghost.

“Be kind to him,” the Professor said, peering over his books in a distracted fashion, when they asked who Jon was, what he was doing there, whether he had any family far away. “He’s had something of a rough home life. I’ll say no more.”

And neither would Jon himself, no matter how they poked and pried at him - politely, in Peter’s case, delicately in Susan’s, and rudely, in Ed’s (Lucy, even after she had ceased to think him a specter, still shyly refused to speak to him, and in consequence, if Jon liked any of the Pevensie children in those early days, it was her).

She remembers the first words he spoke to her, of course - the first real words, other than shy _hullos_ and a muttered _excuse me_ , which don’t truly count in any case. She remembers the low light in hall, barely enough to see Peter by as they whisper about Lucy, and what to do about her wild stories and her potential madness; remembers Peter’s hushed goodnight once their decision was reached, and the soft thump of the heavy door to the boys’ room as it shut behind him.

And remembers the way the light gleams and catches as she turns, shining off the liquid dark of Jon Snow’s eyes, peering out from his cracked door.

Some part of her, deep down, is certain he’d have shut the door and said nothing more about it, were it not for the sound she makes - a high squeak half strangled in her desire to keep quiet, catching and sounding like nothing so much as a choked sob, robbing her of whatever dignity being caught prowling about the hallways at night in her nightgown had left.

“I say, I’m sorry,” he says, jerking the door fully open. “I didn’t mean to listen in. I’m not a spy. Please - please don’t sound like that.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Susan echoes, one small fist clenched, torn between the desire to turn and run and the need to know something she can’t quite identify.

He hesitates a long moment, and she watches him in turn; the way his eyes squint in the light as though he’s barely holding sleep at bay; the way his pajamas are a touch too small and his hair a touch too long, beginning to curl around his ears as though it’s not been trimmed since he arrived. It all makes him more human somehow, and she smiles before she realizes it, even through all her weariness and worry about Lucy and her ridiculous world in the wardrobe.

She remembers how he smiled back. “I’ve hidden some cake from dinner, if you’d like,” he offers, ducking his head, fiddling with the cuffs of his too-short sleeves.

“The lemon one?” It hadn’t been that good, as cakes went - Susan remembers real sweets from birthdays past, before rationing ruled their lives - but cake is cake, and she does love lemons.

He nods, and holds the door wider, and she hesitates - that last moment of hesitation, she recalls well. The knowledge that her room was so close, and Lucy waiting, perhaps breathing softly in sleep, or perhaps awake and alone in the darkness, missing her sister and frightened - _but he’s alone too,_ something in her mind whispers, and she steps over the threshold.

“You remind me of my sister,” he says some time later, their fingers and faces sticky with stolen cake, the curtains drawn back to bathe them in moonlight (always, always she would love the sight of him in the moonlight). “Except you’re much nicer.”

“I might not be nice at all,” she says, trying to sound crisp and efficient and, she suspects, failing miserably at both. “You don’t even know me. I daresay Peter and Edmund might tell you otherwise!”

“They’d be wrong,” he says, very seriously, with such a stoic, determined look on his face that her heart aches; she hates it when Peter looks that way, as he does more and more often since their father left, and likes it no better in Jon.

He tell her all about his family then, in fits and starts and bits of stories she pieces together as he goes; his two sisters, Sansa and Arya, opposite as the sun and moon (she’s rather offended to find that the one she reminds him of is the one he likes least, but endeavours to let it go). His younger brothers Bran, crippled by shrapnel from a stray bomb that struck their estate, and Rickon, the baby; and last of all, but with the greatest affection in his voice, he tells her about Robb, his twin and best friend. “We’ve always said we may as well be twins,” he says, looking away from her, brushing the cake crumbs neatly together in the handkerchief he’d wrapped it in. “We’re not really, of course. We have different mothers. That’s why I’m here, and not with them.”

His father, he tells her - slowly, painfully, while she sits and listens, resting her head on her drawn-up knees, moving not a muscle as though he might take flight at the slightest provocation - is a decorated career military man, pressed back into service by the war, somewhere out on the Continent now, just like hers.

“And Lady Stark said - well. I guess six children were too many for her to manage,” he says, the forced lightness in his voice falling flat. “So here I am.”

“Here you are,” she echoes, and impulsively takes his hand, warm and still a little sticky. His face in the moonlight is surprised, and shy. Still, she thinks there’s a little smile there too.

“I miss them,” he admits. “Especially at night - I share with Robb back home, you see. I’m not used to being alone. That’s why I was awake to hear you. I really didn’t mean to listen in, but you sounded so worried that -”

“You were worried, too?”

“A little,” he admits, seeming sheepish in the way that only boys of a certain age who are being forced to admit they might care for the feelings of others can be. It strikes her then, sitting on an old rug with lemon cake crumbs scattered about and his hand still in hers, that he may well be the most earnest person she’s ever met, outside of Lucy, who’s never been able to help it. And so she tells him the whole story.

When she’s finished, he sits quietly for a moment, staring at nothing in particular with eyes now much more alert. “I don’t know,” he says, slowly. “Bran’s rather like that too - my little brother. He’s always telling us strange things that don’t make any sense, even more since - since the attack. He told Sansa once that he’d seen her as a queen, all wreathed in smoke. And he told me I’d be a great knight, like one of King Arthur’s. He says he dreams it, though. Only kid stuff, I suppose. Robb and I used to play kings and knights all the time when he was just a baby. It must have gone to his head.”

“He wants to make you happy,” Susan says, and withdraws her hand finally, smothering a yawn. It’s hot against her face, she notices; all pink and warm from the heat of his skin, feeling sharply cold now in the night air. “It isn’t like that with Lucy,” she says, trying to suppress the strange fluttering feeling in her stomach; probably the result of too much late night cake. “She wasn’t gone long enough to have fallen asleep, much less dreamed anything.”

“Dreams are funny things,” Jon says. “You can live for hours in them and then wake and find you’ve only just dozed off and it’s been no time at all.”

She leaves him then, with thanks for the cake - “And thank you for - for listening, too,” she says, her hand on the door latch. “I know we’re not your family, but...we could be your friends,” she finishes, feeling the words fall lamely from her lips, not anything close to adequate, to making up for the place he’s been put in. “Please don’t isolate yourself so anymore.”

“I’ll try,” he says, and watches her all the way back over the threshold of her own room, his soft _Goodnight, Susan,_ echoing in her ears as she lays down, and falls into a dreamless sleep.

\--  
That rainy morning in the Professor’s house is a blur. The dashed plans for the day she remembers well enough, and then prowling up and down the portrait gallery with Lucy, making up tales for the painted faces, until they heard the telltale officious tones of Macready signaling a tour was on the way, and ran to warn the boys.

Had Jon been there then? Had he taken her advice, and joined the boys in studying the logistics of armor? Or had he been shadowing her and Lucy, listening to fanciful tales of torrid love affairs (Lucy’s invention, surprisingly, and Susan wonders just what her sister has been reading) and outsized suffragette adventures (these are all Susan’s)? This, she has come to accept, is a thing she may never know.

What she _does_ remember is that when they pile into the wardrobe, breathless and taut, it’s Jon who ends up at her back, his steadying hand placed on her shoulder; Jon who asks her what’s wrong when she startles at the realization there is a fully grown, live tree jabbing into her thigh, Jon who helps her slide a fur coat over her shoulders while Peter is busy with Lucy and Edmund sulkily helps himself. Jon who looks like something out of the portrait gallery wrapped in his own grey and black fur, a barbarian king of eld.

“Just need a sword, eh?” he jokes, catching her staring, her cheeks flaming even in the bitter cold.

“Don’t be silly,” she says. “What could we possibly need with a sword, of all things?”

She will remember that, too.

\--  
The hours immediately following have been recalled time and time again, of course - the trek to Mr Tumnus’s shattered house, the bright breast of the helpful robin leading them along, the meeting with the Beavers, Edmund’s disappearance. 

The Beavers look at Jon askance, truth be told. She sees their furry little faces look from one to the other - Peter and Lucy’s shining gold heads, the soft dark caps of hair on her head and Edmund’s, the obvious shared features of their mother’s eyes and father’s chin that mark them all as Pevensies - and then at Jon, with his hair beginning to curl, and his dark haunted eyes staring back. They’ve been oddly insistent on the number four, on the fact that they’re related, enough so that all the children, even Ed, choose to shy away from the point rather than openly declare Jon to be Other.

Still, her own hair is dark enough, and Ed’s is nearly black - and so it must be resemblance enough for the Beavers to nod to each other and say nothing. And he _is_ obviously human, after all.

Father Christmas is much worse.

“I, er - wasn’t expecting you,” he says to Jon, rubbing at the back of his neck in a way that would have made any other personage seem uncertain.

“It’s quite all right,” Jon says, shifting from foot to foot, though the sense of it not being quite all right at all is palpable in the air, Susan’s mind spinning all sorts of grim fairytale scenarios in which Jon has never had a proper holiday in his life.

“Ah, but what’s this?” asks Father Christmas, cupping a hand to his ear in an almost theatrical gesture. “Do you hear that?” Susan hears nothing, and Peter and Lucy appear just as baffled, but Jon’s brow furrows, and he turns slowly before pushing through some prickly evergreens, resurfacing eventually with a small white wolf pup in his arms, squirming but soundless. “There you have it,” Father Christmas says, beaming at the sight, quite apparently self satisfied. “Clearly _someone_ was expecting you, young man.”

“What will you call him?” Susan asks, hanging back as they march forward once more, self-consciously adjusting the new weight of a quiver on her back.

“I’m not sure,” Jon says. “What do you think?”

“Snowflake!” Lucy offers, spinning around and walking backwards for a step or two, until Peter saves her from running headfirst into a snow-loaded branch.

“Witch-killer,” Peter offers, steering Lucy carefully in the correct direction, as Susan wrinkles her nose.

“Definitely _not_ either of those,” she says firmly, watching the little pup, now riding under Jon’s furs in the crook of one arm, only a tiny black nose and eyes which she sees now are red peeping out into the world. “What about Ghost?” she suggests. “He did appear from nowhere, without a sound.”

“Ghost,” Jon repeats, and at this the little pup surges up, licking Jon’s face, tiny paws scrabbling at his shoulder. “I think he likes it.”

“I think he likes _you_ ,” Susan says, catching her tongue, horrified; clamping it down before it can say _and I think I might as well_. 

The look of pure delight he gives her warms Susan straight through. 

\--  
“Welcome, Peter, Son of Adam,” says Aslan. “Welcome, Susan and Lucy, Daughters of Eve. Welcome He-Beaver and She-Beaver.” Susan feels a deep thrill at his voice, rich and golden as no sound has a right to be, and nearly every bit of her is at peace as she’s never felt before. _Nearly_ , of course, because - “You are not the fourth,” Aslan says, turning his great tawny eyes to Jon. “Where is the fourth?” Much confused explanation of Edmund follows, with everyone talking over one another and trying to take the blame on themselves - she and Peter have quite a good row starting over that, mostly on Susan’s part out of a desperate, confused need to distract the Lion’s gaze from Jon - but in the end, it’s all sorted, and Aslan turns to Jon once more, his great tail flicking behind him in a manner that reminds her of a housecat on the hunt.

“You have brought a Watcher,” the Great Cat finally says. “So be it.”

Susan has no idea what that means, and watching Jon out of the corner of her eye, pale and stiff, she knows he doesn’t either. In front of them, Mr Beaver shifts on his webbed feet, and she uses the cover of his rounded head to grab Jon’s hand, giving it the most reassuring squeeze she can manage. She feels the deep breath he takes as much as sees it, the fur of his coat rising like an animal’s breast. “Sir?”

“We will speak later, Jon, Son of Adam. Do not fear your part,” Aslan says, and that is the end of that.

He speaks with Peter first, of course, and there’s that whole ugly business with the wolf and the tree (it’s Peter who pulls her out of the tree, Peter who clutches a sword red with the lifeblood of the creature that would have slaked its thirst on hers, but she remembers Jon just as well, Jon who hangs back with a terrified Lucy held in his arms, his face as he watches Susan blanched pale as any spectre, his fist, empty of any weapon, clenched against Lucy’s back) - but she remembers Jon disappearing with the Lion too, as the sun set in a red splash at the horizon. Remembers him returning fully armed and armored, sword in hand and looking both older and harder than when he’d gone up the hill at Aslan’s side.

Remembers that she had not asked what Aslan had said, feeling it an unbearable intrusion all the way down to her soul, though of course her curiosity burns nearly as deep - and remembers that while he looks at her as though he’s trying to memorize her features, he does not speak, does not tell her a word of what passed between them.

By the time he does, it will be far too late.

\--  
The day they are crowned, Jon stands on the dias before their thrones, taller somehow than he’d been when they’d first arrived, all done up in plain black leather and chainmail armor (he’d refused all else, though Peter and Edmund had insisted on his accepting a glorious sword they’d found in the treasury), with his sword drawn, its point resting on the marble floor at his feet.

Though he’s very careful to stand exactly between Peter’s throne and her own, as befits the new Captain of their guard, it’s Susan he glances over his shoulder at, Susan whose eye he catches before he looks away, the bright sea breeze ruffling his hair.

\--  
She remembers that he is always there when they go to war, always at their sides in the field, always ready to defend any and all Narnians, the first to scout ahead and the last to bring up the rear.

He’s there at Cair Paravel too, at every delightfully informal feast eaten while sitting on the castle’s plush carpets, every lazy afternoon in the orchards with the ripe fruit like jewels dotting the lawns, every wild romp through the forest with Baachus and the Dryads.

The Talking Beasts adore him; indeed, they love no one more, unless it’s Lucy. The few humans who slowly return to Narnia from their exile in Archenland and further abroad treat him with respect and deference; not quite the same as that they show the sovereigns, perhaps, but _close_ , Susan thinks. So close.

Peter and Edmund, after the bonding that only mutual battle experience can achieve, treat him as another brother, in arms if not blood. Lucy laughs at his rare jokes, cajoles him into games, and will accept lessons in how to use her small dagger from no one else.

And Susan - Susan remembers, quite simply, being thirteen years old and one year a queen; remembers watching as Narnia soaks into all of them, making every detail more glorious, more intense, remembers life coming awake within her for the first time, breaking open and blooming when she looks at his face, more sharply in focus with every day.

She remembers falling in love.

\--  
“You’re not going to listen to me, are you?” It’s something of an effort to keep her voice even as she trots along in Jon’s wake; Susan has become an excellent horsewoman and the best archer in the land (not to mention the star swimmer of the family), but moving at any pace faster than a sedate walk is, at best, a distasteful activity in her eyes. _Thank the Lion he’s not as tall as Peter_ , she thinks, _or I’d never keep up_.

“I always listen to your counsel, Your Grace,” he responds. Susan lets out of a huff that stirs the tendrils artfully pulled free from the braids wrapped around her head.

“Do you know how I can tell you’re _not_ going to listen? You just called me ‘Your Grace’ _again_. Honestly, Jon, it’s a terrible tell.”

“Susan-” he says, stopping short to avoid running into her as she slips in front of him, trying not to pant for breath _too_ obviously.

“I mean it,” she says. “You can’t keep on as you are. It’s been over three years, Jon! The Witch’s minions are gone. Narnia is secured. And what’s more, so are the lot of us, thanks to the training you’ve done.”

“I’m shocked any of you are still alive,” Jon says, gazing towards the ceiling, his eyes anywhere but on her.

“Yes, well, we are,” she points out, still trying to cease breathing quite so heavily, hoping the hand she’s pressed to her chest isn’t too obvious. “And that’s thanks to Lucy’s Wolves and Edmund’s Leopards and Peter’s...well, to be frank I’m not certain exactly how Peter’s harem of Dryads protects him, but perhaps it’s better I don’t know. And all of them were trained by you.”

“I don’t see what that has to do-” he says, still refusing to meet her eyes.

“My _point_ ,” she says smoothly, as if he hadn’t spoken - she’s gotten a lot of practice doing that over the last few years, not just with Jon but with everyone who thinks they can talk over a Queen - “is that you deserve to slow down and take the time to think of yourself. Surely there must be something that you want to do, just for you and not in service to anyone else?”

He looks at her then for the first time, and she shifts from one foot to the other, feeling the stone under her feet. It’s a subject they don’t speak of, not openly, though she and Peter had discussed it behind closed doors, back in the early days - the unfairness of how everything had shaken out, with the four of them sitting on thrones, and Jon left over, the spare part. _What is he to be, Peter, our sword arm?_ she remembers saying, in the high, light voice of a girl. _He deserves better than that_. In truth she’d been worried, remembering Jon’s stories of his family; worried that once more he’d found himself the outsider he’d spent his whole life being. It was Edmund who’d solved the whole thing in the end, bursting into their secret conference, flopping down on a beautiful old chaise that creaked alarmingly underneath him, and asking why they didn’t simply let Jon decide for himself.

Certainly they’d never had cause to regret that; Jon had proven himself an excellent leader straight off, organizing a castle guard that he slowly winnowed into a personal guard for each of them, accompanying them on whatever martial pursuits were necessary to clean up the remnants of the long winter, and never uttering a single word of complaint, at least not within their hearing.

And yet. She’s seen it there in his manner more and more recently, the sense of exhaustion, of a wire growing ever more taut, ready to snap. It’s there in the way he’s brusque with Lord Peridan and the other new members of their Council, there in the way he fidgets and paces, there in the way he’s begun to increasingly avoid her, withdrawing into himself.

“Are you ordering me, Susan?” he asks her now, and his gaze - however much it had wandered before - is locked on hers now, in a way she finds unexpected, disconcerting.

“I-” she stops, breathes deep, lets her hands fall to her sides. “If that is what it takes to get you to think of yourself for once, yes. You may consider it an order from your queen.”

“Fine,” he says, past a jaw so clenched she can see the muscles flex in it, even under the dark scruff of stubble that he’s so proud of. “Then I resign as Captain of the Guard.” Before Susan can do more than blink, her thoughts spinning - _no, that is most certainly not what I’d intended!_ \- he breaks, the corners of his eyes crinkling. He’s really the only person she’s ever met who can smile without so much as twitching his mouth, she reflects, before bringing herself back to the here and now with a jerk. “On the condition that I’ll be allowed to serve as your personal guard.”

An odd warmth floods Susan, starting at the soles of her feet and creeping its slow, insidious, delicious way up. She licks her lips, and breathes deep one more time, watching his eyes flick over her with interest. “Jon, I-”

“Don’t need my protection, I know,” he says, adroitly stepping around her and setting off once more at that pace that’s just a touch too fast for her. “That isn’t what I see. You’re in laughable shape - how could you overpower an assassin with no fighting skills to speak of?” She attempts to protest, but he continues as if she hadn’t spoken. “A bow is no weapon for close-quarter combat, and you’d be utterly defenseless without someone at your side to protect you. Is that what you want? Susan,” he amends, somewhat lamely, catching sight of her face once more; surely it’s a thundercloud he sees there now, no matter how placid she tries to keep her (rather pink and dewy) face.

“I see you’ve been keeping quite a close eye on me already,” she says, stopping and crossing her arms.

“I always do,” he says, and does the one thing that could diffuse her annoyance, as it always does; he smiles at her, using both eyes and mouth this time. “We’ll start training tomorrow, then.”

“Oh, Peter and Ed are going to _love_ this,” she mutters.

\--  
At fifteen, she remembers realizing the effect she has on men.

They may not always respect her - the Narnians do, of course, and foreigners either learn quickly or fail to do so at their peril - but they do notice her. They watch her, they flatter her, they covet her.

Lucy is a tactile person, a bright beam of sunshine, a jolt of pleasant warmth. She whirls through life leaving no one untouched; everyone is hugged, has their hands clasped, their cheeks kissed, and their backs hung from (while she’s still small enough, at least, and both she and Peter are sad - for different reasons - the day it becomes apparent that she’s grown too heavy to hang off him like a monkey).

Susan, by nature more reserved than her sunny sister, learns to use touch as a weapon, a tool in her arsenal. She withholds, she is sparing, she is calculated; _let me be anticipation_ , she thinks. Intoxication. A shock to the senses. The only men she ever holds free and clear of any motivation now are her brothers.

Jon she rarely touches at all, though this is his choice more than hers. Her admirers come to refer to him as her Crow, “Because he’s always lurking, you see,” cheeky Lord Peridan tells her once, “and watching everyone who approaches you with that gimlet eye.”

“And black is his color,” she muses, for he does favor it still; all of Narnia may burst with ripe color, their world painted in rich hues, but not Jon. He remains, as he ever has been, stark black and white.

In the training yards though, she exults, for he’s kept his vow to train her, until she can fight with daggers, with a shortsword, with nothing but her own body, if need be.

There they can freely lay hands on one another, and do, circling, spinning, trying their best not to be the one who ends up on their back in a brutal dance that leaves her flushed, running hot.

Outside of the yards, though - “My Queen,” he’ll say, bowing low while backing off just enough to avoid her fingers brushing his arm; his gestures always indicating she should walk ahead rather than at his side; his ability to quietly disappear never more honed than when he’s left her at the doors of her chambers, ever so slightly tipsy from banquets, wanting to forget she’s not supposed to touch.

And yet - he does keep watch, for no man, however royal he may be or however important he fancies himself, ever lays an unwelcome hand on her while Jon is near.

For now, she wraps herself in his steady gaze (and the memory of his hands on her with a bruising grip, of her back hitting the dirt and his grinning face rising over hers, curls falling in disarray around his face) and lets that be enough.

\--  
The white dress she wears the night she turns seventeen is imprinted on her mind forever as her favorite garment in two worlds. Sleeveless and drawn close to her body by the gold laces running up the back, its multiple layers of skirts are slit near to the hip, swirling and offering an alluring glimpse of long legs (for she has grown tall, equal in height now to all but Peter) with her every movement. Peter merely blinks at her in an exaggerated fashion as she comes down the stairs; Edmund gives her a long whistle, and Lucy laughs, shooting her an appraising look. “The Naiads’ work?” her sister guesses, correctly, as it happens. “It puts me in mind of water, somehow.”

“Well, Su,” Ed says, proffering his arm when Peter proved seemingly too stunned to move, “no one will doubt you’re a Queen tonight, and a woman who knows her own mind.”

“A _woman_ ,” she says, taking his arm with the sweetest smile she can muster. “That is exactly the point, dear brother.”

“He won’t be able to take his eyes off you,” her little brother murmurs, for her ears only. “And don’t pretend to be confused or shocked. Don’t forget who you’re talking to - I know you.”

He does, of course - very little escapes Edmund’s notice since he made it his business to become Narnia’s spymaster - so she stills the urge to flinch, to face him full on, and settles for the best side-eye she can manage. “Does it leave enough to the imagination, do you think?”

“Only just,” Ed responds. “And please don’t ask for more detail - you _are_ still my sister, after all.”

“Do you think it’ll work?” she asks, as they enter the great hall, the long tables already groaning with the weight of silver and gold plate, with bowls fashioned from mother of pearl, with rich delicacies and crystal goblets filled with heady spirits. Jon, already waiting for her behind the place of honor at the middle of the table, goes still when they walk through the doors; even at this distance, she fancies she can see him catch his breath. Every eye on the room is on her, but his are all she feels.

“Not a chance,” Ed says, leaning in to kiss her cheek. “He’s far too careful for that, even if you are disturbingly reckless. Still,” he says, more loudly, as they approach her seat, “I wish you the best of luck. I deliver you your charge for the evening, sir,” he finishes, passing her hand to Jon and giving her an elaborate, formal bow; Susan resists the urge to kick Ed’s shins with some difficulty. “Please, take it upon yourself to ensure that your Queen’s evening comes to a...satisfying ending.”

“My very first birthday wish,” Susan says over her shoulder in as sickly-sweet a voice as she can manage, “will be to have all _baby_ brothers removed from the room at once.”

Edmund smirks. “Pity,” he says, backing away. “Everything looked so delectable, too.”

The only saving grace in _that_ line, Susan thinks as she turns back to Jon, is that she knows exactly how much it must have cost Ed to say that about his sister.

That, and the fact that Jon appears nonplussed by her brother’s wordplay. Indeed, he’s standing before her frozen, her hand still in his where Ed had placed it, his eyes hovering somewhere about the level of her stomach. “Jon?” she says softly, pulling herself closer, using one finger to tip his chin up to the level of her face.

At that, he pulls himself together with a precise twitch, falling back into his normal bearing; her stalwart shield, her sword in the darkness. “Susan,” he says, sounding as breathless as she feels. “You look…” The right words elude him as she stares into his eyes, unwilling to let go of him, to let go of this moment. “Perfect,” he finishes, on an exhale.

All through dinner, she’s aware of his eyes on her back; on the shoulder blades and delicate span of collarbone the dress leaves exposed, on the curling wisps pulled just so from her crown of hair, brushing the nape of her neck (she imagines them his fingers and shivers, more than once), on the slender column of her neck when she turns to speak, limned in candlelight.

“Dance with me,” she pleads (demands? commands? she’s no longer certain), much later, after the clear wine warming her belly has had time to do its work.

“I don’t know how to dance.”

“Edmund already tried that one, and it didn’t work then either,” she says, refusing on tonight of all nights to take no for an answer. “I’m the one who taught you both to dance!” He acquiesces, of course, once she manages to set her hands on his arms, and follows her down to the open floor. “Besides, you dance with me all the time, out in the yards.”

Jon stares out over her head, though she’s secretly satisfied to see he has to tip his head up just a bit to do so. “That isn’t the same.”

“No,” she says. “It’s better.”

That makes him laugh, and he meets her eyes again as the music changes, the fauns on their flutes and drums hearing her unspoken wish, switching from a slow, stately tune to one much faster, wilder in tone. “How is it better?” he asks, absently pulling her close against him, his hand firm on her hip, her years of dancing lessons having ingrained themselves in him after all. “We end up bruised and dirty and too tired to move, most days.”

“Exactly,” she says, pressing her body flush against his and away again in time with the music, delighting in the look on his face, letting herself dream and drift, her pulse beating in time with the drums, with their movement around and against each other.

He escapes from her after that, due to an unfortunately timed intervention on Peter’s part, and she doesn’t see him again until the candles are guttering in their holders, the fauns nodding over their instruments, the dark night winking black and absolute behind the glass paned doors.

By then, she’s drunk what she and Edmund have long since deemed _just enough_ \- just enough to be brave but not foolish, just enough that her natural grace can still overbalance the pleasant dizziness in her bloodstream, just enough that anything at all becomes possible.

Just enough that when Jon says, “Let me take you up to bed,” she wants to giggle madly but manages to resist the urge; just enough to remember, as they reach her door, that her earlier, more sober self had given her usual bedchamber maids (two Ravens and one highly adroit, if vulgar, Otter) the night off in celebration of her birthday.

“Wait,” she says, as Jon turns to leave at the door, after Ghost does his own careful sweep of her room, the way the pair of them have protected her in tandem for years now. Her throat is dry, her head full of a gentle, pleasant swimming feeling, and her blood running heated through her body - perfect, in other words. And Jon’s still looking at her like he has all night; as though he’s drinking her in, as though he may never see her like this again. “I can’t get it undone myself,” she says, turning her back to him, peering down over her shoulder to the lacing running up the back of her dress. She waits, holding her breath, waiting, her eyes lowered; she can’t bring herself to raise them, to face whatever she may see in his. There isn’t enough _just enough_ for that, not yet. “Please, Jon,” she says, her voice as low as her gaze.

She hears his sigh; hears the door softly shut, hears his steps cross the floor towards her, quick, decisive. When his fingertips touch her, sliding between the dress and her skin to give him room to work at the knots, she shudders, involuntarily, the feeling leaping through her like lightning coursing over her body. _It’s not fair,_ she thinks, lost in the sensation, in the desperate need it’s flicked on within her. _This is what I’m supposed to do to other people._

“Please don’t,” he says thickly, a breath behind her, the knots pulling free, the laces loosening. His fingers rise, tracing along the fabric’s edge, her dress held up now only by her hands and the desperate force of those words. “I can’t, Susan.” Along her neck, the tendrils of hair stir as if moved by a breeze in the still room; then, incredibly, she feels his lips press to the nape of her neck, for the briefest of seconds.

He’s gone before her bemused brain can process that, before the trembling in her knees has stopped; this time, when the door clicks gently shut, he’s on the opposite side.

\--  
There are other men, and she tries, after that.

Wait - that, she remembers, is a lie. She does not try, not a bit.

Peter, however, tries very hard on her behalf.

“I don’t understand,” she says to him one afternoon in the merciless glare of their open-air war room; once it had held councils of actual war, military plans and battle strategies littering its long tables. These days, their wars are all fought with words; battles of diplomacy, and strategies of a different sort. “Did you really think I’d enjoy his company, or do you simply have a sudden wish to be rid of me, that you’re seeking to marry me off to the first so-called Prince of So-and-So?”

“I believe he proclaimed himself a Duke,” Peter says absently, shuffling through papers at the table’s far end, before looking up at her with a grin. “Of course I don’t want to be rid of you, Susan, nor did I have any illusions you’d entertain the thought of such a blithering idiot as your husband for a single second. However,” he continues, cocking his head and raising one eyebrow (a trick she knows he’s very proud of), “it’s a foolish collection of rulers who don’t use every tool at their disposal. And I do not intend for us to be fools. If imaging they may win Queen Susan the Gentle, the Beautiful, the - what was it, Most Supremely Elegant? - as their bride buys us a more favorable trade deal, or amnesty for captured Narnians, or hopeful friends on our borders, who are we to turn that down?”

“How flattering,” Susan says, her voice dry as the deserts that lie to the south. And yet, she can’t disagree; Peter’s strength has always been in martial pursuits and administration, Ed runs their spy corps like clockwork, Lucy ties everything together, standing as a living argument for the glory of Narnia, and Susan - Susan must be their diplomat, in whatever form that may take. If that means Peter throws every unattached noble male between the ages of fourteen and eighty-five at her to charm, so be it.

All of them, to a man - golden-haired Princes, Dukes with muscular physiques, Emperors with more jewels to bestow than stars in the sky, trade barons who fancy themselves clever enough to make her laugh - bore her. Every one, she compares to the man standing at her back; every one, she finds wanting.

She doesn’t blame Peter, of course. He doesn’t know her heart has been occupied - that golden hair could never take the place of black, that she’s felt (and seen, in stolen glances) the only muscles she wants under her hands, that she would trade all the wealth in Cair Paravel for the man who’s always been able to set her aglow with a smile, whose sparing words are exactly correct.

So, the truth: she does try, very hard, to win one particular man, even as his agonized _I can’t_ echoes in her mind.

\--  
“Why can’t you?” she says one night, lying under the stars. That he knows what she means, she has no doubt. It’s been different between them ever since her birthday, the two of them watching each other warily and hungrily by turns. 

“It isn’t my place,” he says, staring up into the sky. “There’s you, and your brothers and sister, and then there’s me. My role is to protect you. How can I do that if-”

“If what?” she asks, soft. He only shakes his head in answer. “I love you,” she says, softer still; no revelation to either of them, that. She’s done so since they met.

“I know,” he says, and the look on his face is so broken, so devastated that she closes her eyes against it, rather than watch him crumble. “But you don’t know what it means, for me to love someone back. I can’t ask that of you.”

“I’ll never stop waiting,” she says, and feels his fingers brush away the tear that slips from the corner of her eye, betraying her.

“I know that, too.”

\--  
Eventually, of course, she grows older, and tired of waiting. Eventually, of course, so does he. This, she remembers bright and clear.

There is a tide pool in a hidden grotto at Cair Paravel; a lovely hollow of ocean blue, cupped in a mother of pearl shell, a cloud inverted. She loves it in the daylight, glimmering bright under the sun, blinding, reflecting like sparks of the lion’s mane.

She loves it more at night, soft beneath the stars, the water on the edge between warm and cool, leaving her floating, free, contained in nothing at all.

“Join me,” she calls tonight, moon-drunk, wine drunk. Drunk on the nearness of him, always so close. Always so far.

Jon just shakes his head, back resolutely turned (he knows she’s looking, though. he always knows). Too frightened to see, she thinks, slipping underneath the water, resurfacing streaming, the gossamer silk of her underdress molded to her body. “Too afraid to get your precious hair wet?” she says, low voiced, her hands gripping the stone edge of the pool just behind where he stands. “Don’t make me order you, Jon.” The salt on her lips stings her tongue as she speaks, the slit fabric of her skirt caressing her legs, whisper soft, edging between them and away with the water’s motion. She’d meant her voice to come out light, brushing off their shared joke, but instead it’s low, roughened, nearly ragged.

He glances at her then, turning just enough, and it’s that look that undoes him. Even by moonlight, she can see the effect she has on him, can feel the moment he huffs out a noise halfway between a laugh and a sigh; _feels_ the thump his boots make as he pulls them free, drops them one by one on the stone surround. Feels the clink of every buckle, the whisper of every strap pulled loose until he’s shed his armor, pieces lying scattered around him like a second skin. _Feels_ the water ebb and surge as he slips in, going under and rising to the surface again, startlingly close. At the pool’s edge, Ghost settles himself on a bed of leathers, staring at her with blood red intensity; in the pool, Jon moves closer, his gaze no less intense, watching her as if he could see straight into her, through saltwater, silks, and skin. “My hair,” he says, running a hand over it, brushing its dripping mass from his face, “is fine.”

“Then what do you fear?” she asks, her breath coming short, skin tingling with every swell and eddy washing over her, with every undulating movement of his body and hers, both treading water but growing closer, ripple by ripple.

“You,” he says, and then her back is against pearl, stone against her shoulders, his mouth covering hers, and she clings to him as though she might drown.

\--  
Cair Paravel holds many secrets; her tide pool in its grotto is one. The tiny room hidden up a short, spiral flight of stairs opening out from a wardrobe in her chambers (the wave of nostalgia she feels whenever she opens that wardrobe, inexplicable) is another. Perfectly contained and perfectly exquisite, it has been her refuge for years, her own bit of assured privacy, richly carpeted and adorned with bookshelves, velvet cushions, and a single deep-set window, known to none but her.

It’s here that she takes Jon that first night, and so many thereafter; here that he lays her down, tenderly easing the wet silk, inch by inch, from her skin until she is clothed before him only in salt; here that she gasps, and keens, and shudders beneath his hands; here that they learn each other’s last secrets, and are forever joined.

\--  
In the light of dawn, creeping grey and silent over the high windowsill, she sees the panic on his face, and pushes down her hurt, understanding somehow, instinctual. “You don’t want anything to change.”

“Everything’s changed,” he says, clasping her hand in his, kissing her knuckles. “It’s not that. I’d just - rather keep it to ourselves. It doesn’t belong to anyone else.”

She frowns; not at Jon, but in the abstract. “Peter and Ed will keep throwing men at me, you know, if they don’t know that I - that a foreign union can never be. And I’d be a fool not to do whatever I can for Narnia.”

“You should,” he says. His thumb rubs across her knuckles, soothing for her even as she knows it’s a nervous gesture for him. “You know I can’t marry you, Susan.”

“That doesn’t bother you?” She tries her best to keep the hurt from her voice; still, it hasn’t escaped her notice that he’d been very careful, both times they’d made love before the sun rose, not to leave her pregnant. “You know I don’t care about any of that - if you think I wouldn’t want to, you know. Marry you,” she finishes, her tongue twisting inside her mouth, a bitter knot.

“Of course it bothers me,” he says, almost too quiet for her to hear, staring at their joined hands, watching that small motion between them so he doesn’t have to look at her, she thinks. “It isn’t because of you. It’s me. It’s who I am. That’s why I’ve tried for so long to - By the Lion, Susan,” he says explosively, finally meeting her eyes. “I’ve loved you since we were children. But I can’t-” He stops again, shaking his head, and she clasps his hand all the tighter, wanting to anchor him to her side, now and forever.

“We can just have this,” she says, reaching out, laying a hand on his cheek, forcing him to look at her once more. “It’s alright, Jon. This is enough.”

It will never be enough, she knows; not as he takes her once more in his arms, kissing her desperately, with a renewed hunger, as if all their tomorrows might never be, and this moment is all he has.

 _Never_ , she thinks, as he pulls her into his lap, as they come together once more in a heated frenzy. _But for now, let the lie be told._

\--  
There are tomorrows, of course, and years where they are happy, clutching their secret close; in privacy and love they are equal, while publicly they remain the Gentle Queen and her faithful guard.

“Do you ever resent it?” she asks him once, lying in a stolen sunbeam in their hidden nest. She knows perfectly well he’ll have no need to ask what _it_ is; between them, in this time and this place, it could be very few things, and with the word _marriage_ being one that lies forever unspoken between them, that leaves only the one.

“Sometimes,” he says, and she relaxes into the warm burr of his voice, its deepness reminding her of the purr of a very large cat; or the growl of a wolf, as though he’s stolen the voice of his Ghost, silent as ever at his side. “I used to, at least. But somewhere along the way - how could I? I see how it wears on you all. The responsibility, the patience, the way you always need to act, to pretend. That’s not me. I’m much better off as I am.”

She smiles, even though her heart is all tangled up in her chest; she does not ever pretend, not with him. Not anymore. “I would resent it, if I were you,” she says, tracing her fingers along his arm absently, just to be able to touch him; that need has never lessened. “You’re a better person than I.”

“Never,” he says, and kisses the top of her head; she closes her eyes, and breathes, and etches another memory into her mind.

\--  
She remembers things she wishes she did not, as well. The day Jon dies surely stands chief among them.

She remembers being with him in the orchard, the two of them still stupid with the heady drug of newly admitted love. Remembers him feeding her berries fresh from the bush, ripe and bursting with juice as they touch her lips, leaving them stained red and bold. Remembers thinking they are alone, and at peace, the safe blanket of security that he’s always brought to her still wrapped around them, snug and whole.

She remembers, too, the little dwarf who pierces it, emerging from the bushes with barely a rustle; remembers the small woman approaching Jon, her hoarse little voice rising as she unleashes a litany of complaints against him, her accusations of his betrayal of the palace guard growing more strident by the moment, for reasons Susan does not quite grasp.

She recalls with sharp edged clarity the flash of the knife the dwarf pulls, the way it catches the light for a single second before plunging directly into Jon’s heart; she remembers the ungodly sound that emerges from her own throat, a wail torn free, caught somewhere between grief and fury.

(She does not remember reaching out, does not remember the snap the little dwarf’s neck makes as she twists, brutally hard. She only knows this happened because she will notice the body there, when all is done.)

She remembers the Beasts rushing into the orchard from all sides; remembers Ghost throwing his head back in a soundless howl; remembers screaming for her sister, Lucy’s name torn from her over and over, as her faithful Ravens wing overhead, flying with all speed the shortest way to the palace.

She remembers Lucy’s face, dead white as she throws herself to the ground beside them moments later, panting; remembers the slick red of Jon’s blood, already covering her hands pressed over his wound, over her pale skirts, over the once-green ground, all around them.

Remembers, in a tangled mess that she would prefer not to, Edmund’s arrival, and the curses he chokes back. Remembers Lucy saying, sounding broken, “It’s no good, Susan - I think he’s-”

Remembers her own voice, harsh as a crow from her raw throat, shredded from the screams she shudders even now with repressing. “ _Do it._ ”

She will never forget the droplet of Lucy’s cordial, hanging endlessly in space before dropping, falling over his lips; remembers the seemingly infinite space waiting, laying her head on his blood soaked chest, sobbing until she can neither hear nor think.

It does not work.

Until - she tastes copper on her tongue, on her lips, and beneath her, he stirs, groaning, gasping wetly, a sucking, bubbling sound both horrid and sweet to her ears.

She recalls, in the vaguest series of impressions, Lucy ordering him taken back inside the palace, calling for their best healers; recalls Edmund shifting a small body with a distasteful look, calling for someone to _discard this trash_ ; recalls Peter, coming late to the scene at a dead run, stopping short when he sees her, coated in Jon’s blood. Remembers collapsing into his arms, still sobbing, until blissful darkness takes her, and she knows no more.

\--  
He is still healing when Rabadash comes to visit, she recalls. Lucy’s cordial works its prescribed miracles, but still, Jon is left weakened, more easily tired, the pink scar over his heart still inflamed to her lightest touch.

It is for this reason that he fails to accompany her to Tashbaan. It is on this reason that she blames her distraction, her failure to realize until too late the danger that lurks in the desert, in the black heart of a prince who’d seemed no different than all the others back in Narnia, a charming, vapid shell she could control with ease. (“All will be well,” she remembers blithely promising Jon, pale and anxious, swaying on his feet, before she departs. “I’ll have Ed with me, after all. You’ll not need to fight any battles to get me to return home, I assure you.”)

He meets them with the bulk of the Narnian reserve force (the main force, of course, being away with Peter in the North, fighting the troublesome Giants), word having been sent ahead, and it’s only by sheer force of will that she keeps him from following Ed and Lucy into battle in Archenland, holding the line with them against Calormen.

“I’m going to kill him,” he says to her in greeting, quite conversationally, when they manage to draw apart from the main host, lost for a moment in an evergreen grove, the bustle and clatter of the army surrounding them muffled.

“Take me home,” she says, thinking of all the protests she could make and finding them ineffective. “Please, Jon,” she says, grasping his hands, resting her forehead against his. “I lost you once. Don’t make me do it again.” He breathes sharply at that, and clutches her fingers so hard she feels the bones grind together; but when she turns for home, waving her siblings farewell and godspeed, he is at her side.

Late that night, tucked once more safe in their refuge, she says the words that have lain between them for so long, repressed. “Marry me. Please, Jon.” Tashbaan overtakes her once more - the oppressive heat, the cloying scents and haze of smoke rising in the thick air, the feel of Rabadash’s fingers, crawling like lizards over her skin, his grotesque words roaches crawling inside her mind. Tears come unbidden to her eyes; it seems to Susan, as she fruitlessly pushes the heels of her hands against her eyes until she sees stars, that she has been crying for a lifetime, and she wonders, on a hysterical, hiccuping sob, if she will ever be able to dam the flow again. “It couldn’t happen again,” she manages to choke out between gasps, as Jon gathers her close, letting her hear the soothing _thud_ of his heartbeat. “If we were married - I could tell them, Peter and Ed, if anyone else came for me, and they’d have to understand then, and I couldn’t feel that I had to do it, don’t you see?”

She isn’t making any sense, she knows, but there’s a bitter taste in her mouth, Jon’s scar rough under her cheek and the air in the room too close for her to breathe, too like the waves of heat rising off the sands. “ _Please_.”

“All right,” he says, taking her hands, kissing her face gently; her cheeks, her nose, her eyelids, anywhere he can reach. “Shh. I’ll marry you, Susan. I promise.”

“Right now?” she says, on another hiccup. She expects him to look panicked when she finally blinks enough to clear her vision, expects to see a man backed into a corner by tears, but instead - 

“Yes,” he says, clear and firm, rising to his feet and pulling her after. “I’ve had enough of watching and waiting. Let it be ended.”

That, she remembers, is how she ends up pouring wine on the floor of a forest clearing at midnight, dressed hastily in her favorite gown; how she ends up standing before Bachuus, when he appears, hand in hand with Jon; how she ends up married, at long last, by the drunken god of wine in the clear moonlight of Narnia, with only the stars as witness.

\--  
On the surface, nothing changes; there are no rings between them, no proclamation to her siblings and her people of their joyous union.

In secret, they grow more enamoured of one another with every day, every stolen moment in their bower, every time their lovemaking ends with the two of them still entwined, every time she silently rejoices in their finally being truly, fully joined.

Bitterly, very soon, she will resent this memory even as she cherishes it, will resent the way her lips curve when she imagines how her siblings will react, once they know. Will resent the way she laughs, and tugs at his curls until they hang rakishly over one eye, and says, “I rather enjoy being your wife like this, with it being our secret.” Jon just hums an agreeable noise and rolls her onto her back as she giggles. “We may have to tell, though, quite soon.”

It takes him a second, but Jon always catches on eventually. “Do you mean-”

She lays her finger over his lips and rests her head against his. “I’m not certain yet.”

She remembers the way he smiles at her, looking truly whole for the first time she can recall; remembers drifting in drowsy warmth, wrapped in his arms, treasuring every precious bit of him, down to the bones.

The next day, they chase the Stag.


	2. Without Lying

\--  
When they fall out of the wardrobe, landing in an ungainly pile of limbs before its open doors, Jon is not with them.

Later, when she plays it back in her memory, Susan will recall a blur disappearing through the doorframe as they tumble back into wretched childhood; a blur with dark hair and the gawky height of an adolescent boy.

In the moment, though, there’s too much confusion - Lucy’s skinned her knee and is in tears, Ed has a long splinter stuck in his palm and a face paler than paper, and Susan herself has a gnawing feeling in the pit of her stomach, like a cat clawing at her insides.

By the time they sort themselves out - and slink back to their own proper hallway, doing their best to avoid Macready - it’s nearly an hour later, time seeming to fly by without counting now they’re thrust back into their own world.

And when she throws open Jon’s door, entering the room as though she belongs there, she reels on her feet, feeling faint for the first time in years. His things are gone, the room rumpled as though it’s been packed in haste. “What’s happened to Jon? Where is he?” she demands of the Professor, bursting into his quiet library with all the imperious manner of the Queen she no longer is; but the Professor, bless him, takes it in stride, as he does all things.

“He had to return to his family, child,” he tells her, looking at her over his glasses with a warm sort of pity. “We received a telegram this afternoon, you see. It seems the poor boy’s father was killed over in France. He left at once.”

That night, Susan weeps alone in bed; for herself, for Jon, for the lives lost on both sides of the wardrobe. The clawing in her belly increases as she sobs, not knowing who her tears are even for, there are so many choices; for the man who was her husband, for the boy who is her friend, for his father, dead as she fears her own may be, every day. It’s not until she feels a familiar stickiness between her thighs that she realizes the pain is her monthly blood - her very first in England - and for the first time, she bitterly curses her life.

For the first, but certainly not the last. The worst is yet to come.

\--  
Narnia is all they can talk of in the days that follow, of course. The first days find Susan empty, drifting through the conversation without participating, without truly hearing, merely letting Lucy’s remembrances wash over her, and Peter’s, and Ed’s.

It’s not until Edmund tells a story of his beloved Leopard guard that she realizes something is wrong.

“Jon tried so hard to train the stalking out of them,” she says, laughing a bit for the first time since falling from the wardrobe. “But their eyes _would_ always go wide whenever they saw something of interest. It drove him to madness!”

The room goes silent, though it takes her a moment to notice, her memory locked on Jon’s fondly exasperated face. When that silence hits her full force, she looks up to find all three of her siblings staring at her, the queerest expressions on their faces.

“Jon?” Peter says eventually, frowning. “I don’t recall a- do you mean that other boy who was here in the house?”

She laughs, but it sounds forced, even to her ears, and panic clutches at her spine. “Of course, Peter. He was with us all the time in Narnia. Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten.” Again the silence, and her panic grows.

“But...he wasn’t, Su,” Edmund says, looking from her to Peter. “It was just the four of us for a jolly long time. We couldn’t have forgotten another whole person.”

“This is absurd,” she insists. “You aren’t being funny. He _was_ there.” But all her conviction matters for little in the face of their own, and helplessly she turns to her sister. “Lucy? Surely…”

Lucy’s little face, so much smaller and rounder than it ought to be, is a picture of confusion. “I’m sorry, Susan,” she says, shaking her head. “They’re right - there wasn’t anyone else there. I’m sure of it.”

“He was-” she begins, a tumult of words seeking to tumble from her mouth, damming up against one another. Instead she stops, springing up from the floor. “I can’t,” she says, and runs to be sick in the nearest washroom.

Later, they will try (rather lamely, in her opinion) to apologize, but still, it’s three against one, and all her tears and protestations make no difference in their blank, solid denials, all the worse for the pity she sees behind them.

It isn’t until that night, lying dry-eyed in the darkness, feeling she will never sleep again, that the worst thought of all finally hits her.

What if Jon doesn’t remember either?

\--  
The war ruins everything, for her as with so many others. Telephones are spotty; even those houses that have managed to keep the instruments themselves may not always have service, and the number the Professor provides her for Winterfell, the Stark family seat in Yorkshire, rings endlessly before cycling back to the operator.

In another life, she’d have ordered a horse saddled, or gone out to the pastures where the Talking herds made their homes, and explained to them her great need; she’d have slung her bow on her back and ridden out to find him all on her own, if need be.

Here she is twelve years old, and a girl besides, and can do nothing but write carefully worded letters, coded so as not to alarm any curious family members, and wait for a reply.

\--  
There’s a picture of them, there in the newspaper - blurred and grainy above the newsprint, but still serviceable enough to make out. _The family of slain war hero and former MP Lord Edward Stark at his gravesite_ , the caption reads, its dry, formal, dead prose summing up the situation with a neatness the photo does not reflect. The tall woman in the center must be the former Catelyn Tully, of course; the great Irish heiress. Her face is frozen, something carved of marble. Some might find it hard, unfeeling even, but Susan, with all her years suppressed, knows the look well; knows that some things are too personal, too tightly held to be loosed even for an instant. The young man beside Catelyn, his arm tucked through hers, carries her delicate features in a masculine mold - surely, Susan thinks, this is Jon’s beloved brother Robb, though he looks so much older, so much more a man than she remembers Jon seeming at this age. A tall girl with long, pale hair loose in the breeze turns from the camera, a raised hand managing to shield her face, while a younger girl stares directly at the camera, her eyes seeking out Susan’s almost defiantly. And last of them all, a little boy in a wheeled chair, sitting in front of his mother, head bowed.

Though she searches until her eyes ache, she can find no trace of Jon at all, unless it’s in a slight similarity in the younger girl’s face; in her wide, haunted eyes. Only a blur behind Robb; a blur that might be a shadow, or the back of a black, curly head. It’s impossible for her to say, and finally she gives up, putting their grief away, tucked down with her own.

\--  
In time, her letters come back to her, unopened. In time, the Blitz lessens, and life returns to some semblance of normal; the Pevensie children depart Professor Kirke’s great house, leaving the wardrobe behind.

They still talk of Narnia; quickly (so quickly she loathes herself) Susan learns to avoid Jon’s name, to suppress his presence in her stories, to quiet her voice under the others. It isn’t worth Lucy’s pity, Edmund’s confusion, Peter’s impatient, suppressed irritation.

So she bites her tongue and smiles, and retreats once more behind the mask she’d worn for so long as a Queen; behind the sweet, gentle lies that veil the truth.

If she curses herself for a coward, there’s no one to know. If every returned letter cuts her a little deeper, there’s no one else who knows to look for the wounds.

\--  
That late summer day at the railway station embeds itself forever in her mind, for two reasons.

The second, of course, is the trip to Narnia that began there, and all that followed in that land.

The first, and the more clear in her memory, is this: she sees Jon Snow for the first time since falling from the wardrobe to the unforgiving floor beneath.

Their side of the platform is wide, and empty but for them, with their luggage piled all around, with school looming and the utter exhaustion of being thirteen for the second time, of being an adult who would shortly be forced to prove herself to a collection of bitter, petty children.

So it’s understandable that her eyes should wander; that they should seek out the train arriving opposite, similarly full of young people on their slow, sad ways back to their own schools. It’s more than understandable, she thinks, that they should fix themselves on the sight she’s longed for the entire year; his hair shorter than her memory, his face softer, smoother, its familiar lines blurred by childhood clinging along its edges, but still - there is no mistaking him, not for her. Not ever.

She stands in slow motion, time slowing, second by second, as he turns towards her, and then-

And then. “Stop pulling at me!” she says furiously, wheeling on Peter, with just enough time to take in his shocked and baffled face before the magic yanks on her, a snap separating her from a world that had, for one second, nearly made sense.

In Cair Paravel’s treasure room, locked and hidden all this time, her things still lie safe; her quiver and bow; a white dress with gold laces; an empty wine bottle.

There is nothing there of Jon. The pictures carved and painted at the How show the four of them, and a Lion, and the Witch - and a blur that may be another figure, smudged beyond recognition, or might be nothing at all.

Ed catches her at it, long after everyone else has fallen asleep, or gone off to find solitude at least, if not sleep. “You’re looking for him,” he says, watching her fingertips touch a bare trace of black, the hint of a figure there, behind the dark haired woman she once was. Jon, maybe. Her shadow, just as likely. “I talked to Dr Cornelius,” her brother says, his voice quiet, controlled, carefully neutral, “and I read all the scrolls and books they could give me here.”

“There’s nothing,” she says, pressing her skin into the stone until the grit beneath inflicts pain, sharp and real. “I know.”

“It’s just the four of us, Su,” he says, softly, taking her hands and leading her away; away from their history, away from the person she once was. 

When she faces Aslan, she is more than ready; ready to quit this place, ready to be finished with all and everything.

“I’ll go, and gladly,” she says, to his proclamation that she will not return here again. “Only answer me two questions, and I’ll never ask you for anything again.”

Aslan’s great head tilts at that, and his face looks so sad she’s chilled straight through, twisting her hands together to resist the urge to bury them in his mane, to feel once more as she had long ago, when she was a child in truth, and everything was simple. “Ask,” he says, finally. “But I cannot promise you answers.”

“Do you remember Jon?” she says, off the back of a deep breath. She does not say his name often, not these days.

The great golden eyes blink; the tail twitches: once, twice. “Yes,” he says, once the silence has stretched to the breaking point, once she’s all but certain he’ll make no response at all. _Yes_ , and no more. _Then why don’t the others?_ she wants to yell, to scream in his placid face; _does he remember me?_ she wants to beg of him, the answer that only one other in existence can give her.

But that is not what she came to ask ( _he does_ , her heart insists blindly, unceasingly, against all reason. _he must_ ).

Instead, she breathes again, and remembers Jon’s face smiling down on her, sweet and whole and hers, and asks the one other thing she needs to know.

“Was I pregnant, when - when we returned to our own country, through the wardrobe?” Somehow she can’t look him full in the face at that, and her eyes close, hiding her like a child’s attempt to vanish by blocking out the world. So it is that she feels, rather than sees, his approach; feels the warm damp of his nose nuzzling her face, the rasp of his tongue following, rough but cleansing.

“Dear heart,” he says, on a great, heavy sigh. “It will not ease your spirit to know.”

When they find themselves once more in the sunshine of an English morning, the train opposite them is leaving the station in a puff of steam and the shriek of steel; Susan lets it cover the shrieking in her heart, and sinks back into her place between her siblings, Aslan’s last words echoing in her memory.

\--  
She does not forget.

She badgers the Professor, though he’s heard nothing more of Jon (“He didn’t strike me as one for correspondence,” Digory had told her once, watching her walk away before shaking his head and muttering, “If she wants him, she’ll have to go find him herself - what _do_ they teach them these days?” but Susan didn’t hear _that_ part). At newsstands, she sneaks the local northern papers, becoming rather adept at this small theft, seeking any scrap of news about the Starks, though there’s little enough to be had; they seem to have disappeared from the public eye. She even, with her heart in her throat each time, checks the casualty lists coming back from the Continent, from Africa, from the Pacific. It’s there that she finds his brother’s name, _Robert Stark, Yorkshire_ , and her heart twists a little more for Jon, twists and flutters and batters itself against her ribs, seeking any end to this, any way back to him.

She does, eventually, forget to hope. Schoolwork bores her - how could it not? - and she lets her parents drag her off to America without protest, feeling she could hardly be further from him than she already is, a lifetime and a world away. Even learning upon her return that beastly little cousin Eustace has been to Narnia, and Ed and Lucy have been exiled the same as she and Peter stirs little in her; her Narnia will forever be the golden dream she shared with him, locked in the past. Its future wants nothing from her, and never did, and so she cares nothing for it.

Still - sometimes, it hurts. She mentions Jon one day, absently, when the others are laughing and reminiscing, trying to recall how the _Splendour Hyaline_ had gotten its name. Lucy’s face falls immediately when she does, her thoughts as loud as if they were spoken - _This again, Susan? Still?_ and though Ed tries his best to cover the awkward patch in the conversation, she can’t help but overhear as she leaves.

“Who’s Jon?” Eustace asks, and there’s a confused murmur of Lucy’s voice, of Ed stammering, of Peter’s firm tones cutting through.

“Just a boy who was at the Professor’s with us who Susan took a shine to. Don’t mind her, she’s been stuck on him for years.”

Eustace laughs, and though she tries to forgive him - he is just a child, and knows nothing of her, or Jon, or their world - she never quite does. “Fancy that,” he says, in the high, piping voice of a little boy who has yet to know what it is to love. “Still thinking of a silly crush she had as a kid, when there’s Narnia to discuss!”

\--  
_Jon,_

_I feel I’ve been lost for years. I’m not a part of this world, not really - what is there for me here, without you? Am I really part of Narnia either, anymore? It makes me feel like living in a madhouse, being the only one who remembers._

_Nothing else matters without you, and they don’t know. They don’t care, they won’t hear me._

_I remember our secret nest, all the days we spent hidden there. I remember the morning sun, the way it looked on your skin. I remember every perfect bit of your face, every curl on your head. I remember you, and the way you made me feel, until I feel I’ll burn alive with it._

_‘Do you remember?’ they ask me. It’s all they can say, these days. But everything I remember are things they refuse to hear._

_Do you remember?_

There’s nowhere for her to send her letters now, even if she’d wanted; Winterfell has been closed up for years, as she found the day she’d finally managed to make her way there, a weary, dusty sixteen year old run away from school.

The Starks are gone, and Jon along with them. The Pevensies remain, and so Susan squares her shoulders, plasters on her smile, and moves on, through two worlds that mean nothing to her.

\--  
Hope arrives, at long last, in the form of a tall, slim, flame-haired girl.

She stands out, this girl; Susan would have noticed her that day in the drawing class she’s taken up to fill her time even if the others hadn’t been whispering behind their hands. But whisper they do, and she catches a name that makes her blood rush: _Sansa Stark_.

After a hasty, pointed interrogation of two girls who are surely now more terrified of gossiping than they’d been that morning, Susan understands, and bits of her mind that have been dormant for years rise again, planning, plotting, ready to charm.

Sansa Stark - now one of the greatest heiresses in England, after her mother’s tragic death - had arrived in London some months ago and taken it by storm, becoming in short order the most desirable hostess among the younger society set; her parties highly exclusive, and legendary for their glorious post-war excesses, of all sorts.

Susan means to become her best friend.

In the end, it’s not so difficult. Emotions she hasn’t felt in years - hope, excitement, the dancing edge of joy - urge her on, bolstering her as she spends hours with needle and thread and her patient mother, remaking clothing pulled from thrift shops into dresses that fit her just so. They give her bubbly charm as she persuades the girls at Selfridge’s makeup counter into letting her try all the red lipsticks until she finds just the right shade; lend her the patience to line up the seams of her stockings arrow-straight. And finally, they lend her the confidence to approach Sansa, to slide smoothly into conversation, to watch her reactions and adjust here and there, exactly right, saying exactly the correct things.

Once a queen, always a queen.

Sansa herself is the difficult bit. Something about her reminds Susan of herself, the way Sansa’s glib, glittering exterior hides a girl she suspects is frightened, and shy, and most of all, suspicious. So Susan doesn’t push, doesn’t try to move too fast or be too bold; she merely waits, and glows under each compliment and approving look Sansa tosses her way. Eventually, she’s rewarded.

“I’m giving a party on Friday,” Sansa tells her, offering a scrap of paper covered with her large, loose handwriting. “You should come. It’ll be amusing, I promise.”

Inside, Susan exults. “I’ll try to make it,” she says coolly, offhandedly. The game must still be played, after all.

“Wear something nice,” Sansa advises, turning to go. “My crowd doesn’t care for prim women.”

\--  
Susan becomes a new person - or rather, returns to the one she used to be.

She pushes aside the way her siblings look at her, Lucy’s furrowed brow, Ed’s raised eyebrows, Peter’s glowering. That they dislike her carefully waved hair, her bold crimson lips, her ever higher-heeled shoes, and her form-fitting dresses is obvious, though she wants to laugh at them; wants to ask if they remember Narnia at all, or only the version of her that they want to recall.

They hate what she does to get the money for it all, too. At least, Lucy does, the day she catches Susan sketching a picture of several scantily-clad ladies and a faun in a position that is, put delicately, quite adventurous. “They sell well, to the right buyers,” she says, in answer to Lucy’s wide, round eyes. “Don’t act as though it’s something you haven’t seen before!”

“But- fauns, Susan? How could you?” Lucy says, and leaves with tears in her eyes. Susan simply shrugs, and picks up her pencils once more. She would do this and much worse, if it meant a chance at getting back to Jon.

They hate the way she haunts the post, flipping through for the colored envelopes that mean a new invitation from Sansa; hate the way she grabs for the telephone, her voice sliding from bright to bored when it’s only Aunt Alberta once more. They hate the way she returns home, too late at night, too rumpled from evenings spent dancing and laughing, with the scent of smoke clinging to her hair and too much alcohol on her breath.

Increasingly, Susan finds she doesn’t care.

\--  
They catch her out one night, rather badly. Weeks of parties haven’t quite had the result Susan had hoped for - they’re loud, and wild, and everyone wants to speak with Sansa. There’s been no moment to subtly introduce the subject of family, for she’d discovered quickly it’s a sore spot with Sansa. And the endless flow of alcohol (and the occasional other, more illicit substances), of charming, empty small talk, of men with busy hands and too little self control, has worn her down, grinding off her soft edges until she’s brittle, ready to break.

So it’s a bad time for them to catch her as she’s heading for the door, heels clicking with purpose, the gold edged card with the latest address dangling from her fingers.

“Susan, come say hello,” Peter says, as she passes. “Eustace stopped by.”

“We thought we’d talk of all the lovely old Narnian times,” Lucy says, her eyes bright and shining and beautiful.

Peeking into the room, she meets Eustace’s eyes; he’s older now, of course, and much better than the beast he used to be, but in some respects, he hasn’t changed. His disdain for her is writ clear on his face in the moment before politeness wipes it away, and something inside her snaps.

“Fancy that!” she says, sickly sweet. “How funny you are, still remembering the games we played when we were children.”

The door shuts behind her with a decisive bang; alone on the far side, Susan moves on, into the night.

\--  
The party that night is quieter, chiefly because it’s on the rooftop of the hotel where Sansa lives when she’s in London, the noise of their cavorting dispersing into the open air.

She finds Sansa with her back to the bar, alone for once, sipping a drink and watching a handsome pair at a nearby table; the Tyrell siblings Margaery and Wills, Susan thinks, though she doesn’t know them well.

Greeting Sansa, she notes how morose the other girl looks, how lost as she watches the Tyrells giggle together, watches them poke one another in a childish mock fight, watches as Wills places a protective hand on Margaery’s arm when other men get too close.

“I miss my brother, sometimes,” Sansa says abruptly, turning away, leaning on the bar and looking at Susan, a wry half smile on her face. “Do you have any? Brothers, I mean.”

So Susan tells her about Peter, and Edmund, and Lucy as well, briefly. “I’m sorry about your brother,” she offers. “Robb, wasn’t it? I remember reading that he’d been lost in the war, years ago.”

Sansa nods, twirling her empty glass between her fingers. “He was too young to sign up, but he lied. He always did look older than his age. After our father died…” She shrugs, as if to shrug off all the tragedy that’s plagued her young life, and Susan’s heart aches for her, a brief spasm of guilt and grief all tangled up.

“You have other brothers, though, don’t you?” she prods, gently. So gently - now, _now_ either her world will fully collapse, crumbling into dust, or it will rise again. “I believe I knew one of them, during the war - Jon? He spoke of you occasionally.”

“You know Jon?” The look on Sansa’s face isn’t what Susan’s feared - there’s no suspicion there, no dawning realization that this is why Susan has wormed her way into Sansa’s world; neither is there any fresh grief, any indication that Jon is another of her tragedies. Rather, it’s just pure surprise. “I didn’t think anyone knew Jon,” she says, with a laugh. “He was shut away from the world for so long.”

She explains everything then, the aching, endless frustration of the last eight years of Susan’s life caused by the dullest of reasons. Her mother, Sansa explains, couldn’t cope after their father’s death, so Jon ended up sent away again, further north this time.

“Our uncle teaches at some horrid boarding school up at the ends of the earth in Scotland,” Sansa says, wrinkling her pretty nose. “So Jon went to live there. I don’t think he wanted to stay at home with us, honestly. He was different, somehow, after he came back from wherever you were - we all were, but he was especially strange. And then he just...never came back.”

He’d stayed at the school for years, helping out around the grounds and then teaching himself, long after his own days as a pupil had ended. “I’m not sure what he did after.” Smoke curls up from Sansa’s cigarette in its long, elegant holder, twists about her head, a veil between her frown and the world. “Mother had- had died by then, you see, and the house was closed up. All of us scattered.”

“Do you know where he is now?” Susan asks, trying to hold her voice steady, to let the question float, as though it had no importance at all, as if her life doesn’t hang in the balance. “It would be lovely to see him again.”

She must not quite succeed, for Sansa looks at her queerly. “I believe he’s in London, actually,” she says, slowly. “We don’t speak often, but-” again, she shrugs, the pedestrian gesture somehow lithe and graceful on her body. “I seem to recall something of that nature.” They fall silent for a moment, though Susan is aware of Sansa’s gaze on her, of the thoughts clicking over in her head. “You knew him when you were children, you said?” she asks, a slow smile curving her lips. “He was a sweet boy.” Pulling herself to her full height - several inches taller than Susan, to Susan’s lasting dismay - Sansa gives herself a small shake, as if to leave the past where it belonged. “And he is a _very_ handsome man. I’ll invite him along some night, if you like. I can’t promise he’ll come - he’s never been much for things like this.” 

“I know,” Susan says, before she can stop herself; she has to turn from Sansa’s speculative look, before she can say _tell him I’ll be here_ , for fear it would make no difference.

\--  
He does not come to the next party, or the dinner the week after, nor the wild gathering after that.

Each time, the disappointment is keener; each time, she loses herself a little more, smoking too much, drinking until her thoughts blur, whirling around her mind, drowned and unable to remain in place long enough to hurt.

So close to dawn, when she finally arrives home - that still, quiet, everlasting hour that she spoils by stumbling up the stairs, depending on the bannister to hold her up.

It’s too much to take, so she crawls into Lucy’s bed, feeling her sister’s solid, sleepy form stir beside her as Susan flops down, kicking her shoes off to thump to the floor below, throwing her arm across her face as if that could blot it all out, could stop the room from spinning, the world from not making sense.

“I think I drank too much,” she mumbles, muffled, the skin of her arm sticky against her hot forehead, in response to some half realized noise of inquiry from Lucy.

“Oh, Susan,” she hears Lucy sigh; knows from the movements that rock the thin mattress and set Susan’s stomach to rolling that her sister has propped herself up on one elbow, the better to look down on Susan. _That’s unkind_ , her dizzy brain remonstrates. _Not Lucy_. Never Lucy, even if she couldn’t recall. “Why do you keep hurting yourself?”

“It wouldn’t hurt if I was with him,” Susan says, and curls in on herself, breathing deep until the nausea passes, until the room slows its spin, until Lucy’s small hand against her bare upper arm is a tolerable warmth, rather than a brand. “He _was_ there, Lucy,” she says, into the darkness, as though insisting once more would make any difference, would make any of them hear her. “We were married, just before we chased the stag.”

Lucy is silent a moment, her fingers combing through Susan’s carefully waved hair, pulling free knots and tangles with a careful touch. “You never told us that.”

“In either world,” Susan says bitterly, enunciating each world with care, lest her tongue twist and betray her. That is enough; she cannot tell Lucy the rest, cannot say the words that her mind still shies from, after all this time.

At this hour, the silence around them is absolute; beyond the pulse of her blood hard in her ears, there’s no sound at all. The old house does not shift; no one treads on creaking floorboards; traffic does not pass. It’s as near as one can get, Susan thinks, to being in Narnia, to being in her secret, silent refuge. “Why don’t you remember?” It’s a bare thread of sound, so that her ears, not quite sure of anything over the pulse of blood, are uncertain she’s said it at all.

“I don’t know,” Lucy says, folding herself up against Susan’s back, snuggling in like a kitten. “But just because I don’t remember it doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.” Lucy’s voice grows softer in the grey half light of dawn. “I’m sorry,” Susan hears, before her brain loses its battle against her drugged blood, and surrenders her to blissful unconsciousness at last, tears drying down to salt on the black smudge of her lashes.

\--  
Somehow, Sansa manages to discover Susan’s twenty-first birthday, and insists on the party that night being in her honor.

She dresses for the occasion in cream-colored satin, her arms bare, the skirt slit what would be daringly high among any other set. She’s weaving pearls through her hair when Ed stops in the doorway; in the glass, her reflection meets his eyes, watches him tip his head to the side, considering.

“You wore a dress like that before,” he says, leaning against the door frame. “I remember. In Narnia.”

She freezes, hands held to her head, hardly daring to breathe. “When I turned seventeen. I was younger then.” 

She waits, but he only shakes his head slightly, as if bothered by something just out of reach in his mind. “You still look like a Queen, Su,” he tells her. “Happy birthday.”

\--  
When she arrives that night, Sansa greets her with more animation than usual, a quick flash of slim arms thrown around her in a hug and a perfumed kiss pressed to both cheeks. “Happy birthday, darling,” Sansa says. “I’ve a surprise for you.”

Gently - so gently, Susan remembers - Sansa spins her towards the long bar at the opposite side of the room, towards the man seated there, in a slim, dark suit.

He’s finally come.

\--  
She remembers the way her heart stops, tripping, skipping over a single beat, before slamming back to life, pulsing so hard she’s certain it must be visible.

She remembers Sansa putting something small and cold in her hand, remembers the small nudge of her hands on Susan’s shoulders. “Just in case,” she says in Susan’s ear, her breathy whisper hard to hear over the rush of blood. “You may explain this all later.”

She does not remember crossing the room; only finding herself at his side, trembling no matter how she tries to still it, waiting for him to turn, to face her, to see-

 _His face_. The face she’s seen only in her dreams, in her memories, for near on a decade. Sometimes she’d grown doubtful, wondering if he was as perfect as her mind’s eye painted him, or if it’s merely a trick; of memory, of love, of Narnia. Now she knows - his hair is shorter, its exuberant curl tamed and smoothed down, his beard a neat, clipped affair rather than a wild rout of stubble, and his frame slighter, missing the bulk swords and armor and a life lived in constant motion gave it, but still; still, he is her Jon, and takes her breath away.

As for the rest, the look on his face tells her all she ever needed to know. “Susan,” he breathes, shooting to his feet, his hands reaching for her, stopping just short.

“You didn’t forget.” The knowledge makes her giddy, the rush of blood ceasing its thumping, swimming instead in her head.

“Forget? I thought of you every day.” Shy, careful, he takes her hand, and it’s gratifying, Susan thinks, to feel he’s trembling near as much as she. “We have to get somewhere else, Susan. I can’t-”

“Do this here, I know,” she says, and in clenching her fist, remembers to look at what Sansa had given her. “Bless your sister,” she says, laughing, dangling her prize before his eyes; the key to a room in the hotel.

\--  
The door slams behind them due to the force of Susan’s body pressed against it, Jon’s hands everywhere, in her hair, on her skin, under her skirts, lifting her up while she fumbles at his trousers. “Damned things,” she mumbles. “I haven’t had to do this sort of thing in this world before.” Under her lips, his curve, the rumble of his laugh humming against her mouth, the joy of coming together again infectious.

When he enters her, her legs wrapped around his waist, arms around his neck, she gasps at the sensation, at once so familiar and so foreign, and throws her head back so hard she sees stars, though she feels no pain until much later.

“I missed you,” she gasps against his ear, and “I missed you,” into his mouth, into the hollow of his collarbone where she’s pulled his shirt away, where she can press the crimson stain of her mouth to his pulse, her teeth grazing the salt of his skin.

She shudders, and cries out, and surrenders before he does, such that she misses much of the love-wracked nonsense he whispers to her, lost in his own passion; still, she hears _Susan_ , and _mine_ , and _love_.

Just enough.

\--  
“I never stopped looking,” she tells him, there in the quiet darkness, the streetlamps of London casting great square blocks of light through the windows. “Not really. I sent you letters for years-”

“I was sent away from Winterfell,” he tells her hair, his face buried in it, for they can’t stop once they’ve started, their hands in constant motion, rediscovering every beloved inch. “I never got them.”

“I know,” she says. “They came back to me unopened.”

“I tried, once I was able, to find the Professor again.”

“But he’d had to sell the house, and moved away.”

“And I was trapped up there in bloody Scotland, at the ends of the earth.”

“And we were just children,” she finishes softly. “To everyone else, in any case. But I never gave up.”

“So here we are,” he says. 

“It’s been so long,” she says, and sets about kissing him as though she never means to stop again.

\--  
The next morning, over breakfast, he asks after Peter, and Edmund, and Lucy, and she has to watch his heart break all over again as she explains, as carefully as she can, that these siblings too are lost to him, that they remember him as nothing more than a brief acquaintance of childhood, easily put aside.

“If they were to see me again, they might-” he says, with that old, empty lost look on his face. “I miss them, too.”

“They might,” she says, into the dregs of her tea, empty and hollow as the cup. She already knows they will not.

\--  
She remembers those brief weeks in London as a halcyon time; a refuge from the past and the future, a span of time nearly as golden as old Narnia.

Some nights they go to Sansa’s parties and shine like royalty, a glittering, handsome pair even in that wealthy, elegant, carefree crowd. (“It’s like a Bacchanalia!” Jon sputters one night as they stumble through the door laughing, leaning on one another for support. “This is what you’ve been doing without me?”

“I’m quite sure I did see at least one couple disappear into the bushes,” she muses, before adding, “Bacchus would approve, anyhow.”)

Most nights - and days, and all the time in between - they spend in Jon’s sparse bachelor flat, endless long afternoons spent among the rumpled sheets of his bed, tumbled on the thick rugs that cover the wood of the floors, lying together in the overfull bath.

“Was it always like this?” she wonders once, drunk on the sight of him lying naked in the morning sunlight, the slanting rays lighting up his beautiful, perfect, beloved self. “How could it have ever been this perfect before?”

Jon smiles, his eyes still resolutely closed against the light. “Pleasure’s always sweeter when you have pain to compare it to.”

“No more pain,” she murmurs, dropping light kisses on his eyelids, his cheeks, the corners of his mouth, until he laughs, and moves, and takes her again.

\--  
She speaks to her siblings little, during this time. Her brief hours at home find them anxious, distracted, preoccupied with concerns far from the matter of where Susan spends her time; they do not press her, so she does not press them.

Still, little escapes Lucy’s notice. “You look different, Susan,” she says once, as they pass on the staircase, Lucy going up to bed, dark circles under her eyes, while Susan rushes down, back out to her glorious, glittering kingdom. Her little sister stops her with a hand on her arm, and Susan pauses, beaming up at her without thought; with such a look as she hasn’t given her since Narnia. “You’ve found him, haven’t you?” Lucy says on a gasp, her eyes widening.

“Yes,” she admits.

“Oh, Susan!” Lucy says, wrapping her arms around her (still too small, Susan thinks; strange, how after all these years, the world can still tilt on its axis, can still be something other than what she expects) tightly. “That’s wonderful.”

“Is it?” Susan asks, pulling back. “But I thought you didn’t remember-”

Lucy shakes her head. “I don’t. But that doesn’t mean- it doesn’t mean I can’t be pleased my sister is happy, does it? Whether her truth is mine or not. After all,” Lucy says, looking through Susan completely, her eyes shining with whatever she may see, in her own private world, “haven’t we all learned that lesson quite enough?”

“I wasn’t certain anymore,” Susan says, and kisses the top of her sister’s head, and leaves her standing there, still bathed in that golden glow that is Lucy’s alone; that only certain eyes can see.

\--  
It’s that night that Jon finally breaks, finally fits in the last piece of what has puzzled her for years; of what has left them all broken, piecing themselves back together one sharp-edged fragment at a time.

It begins when she makes her last confession, for she wants no secrets between them, not here and now.

“Do you remember,” she asks carefully, “the night before we chased the White Stag, what I told you? How I thought that perhaps…”

“You were going to have a child,” he says, though he’s not looking at her, his eyes staring up at the ceiling. “I remember.”

“I wasn’t certain then,” she says, her voice soft, a wounded thing still. “I know now. I asked Aslan, the last time I saw him. He told me-” she stops and shudders, remembering the Lion’s last, sorrowful words; gathers herself once more. “He said that such a child could never exist in that world, that some things were always meant to happen. And he said,” she says, propping herself up on one elbow, the better to see his face, “that as he couldn’t tell me another’s story, I should ask you to explain, when I found you again.”

“He knew you would,” Jon says, eyes still closed, still blocking her out.

“Of course he knew. He knew then that whatever faith I had, it was in you, not him. Not anymore.”

“You’ll hate me,” he says, his eyes finally opening, fixing on her with an anguish that steals her breath.

Her fingers splay over his chest; over the silver scar, fainter in this world but still there, feeling his heart beat beneath. “I couldn’t. No matter what.” What she does not say, hidden in the feelings all jumbled up together inside her, is that no child could ever mean as much to her as him; that even so horribly high a price was one she would pay again to keep him, if asked. She had chosen him half of two lifetimes ago, and of everything Narnia had given her - knowledge, confidence, peace - this, for her, is its true magic; the two of them, bound together in that world, in this, in every one.

So he explains, going back to those first early, chaotic days in Narnia; back to the time when they were just children in borrowed fur coats, who knew nothing.

“He sat there with me on that hill,” Jon says, in a steady, monotonous voice, as if he’s practiced the telling of this a hundred times, “with the sun setting before us and the Stone Table at our backs and the first wine I’d ever tasted warm in my belly, and asked if I knew what a Watcher was meant to do. ‘Watch, I suppose, sir?’ I said, because I was a child, and a fool, and a little drunk besides. He laughed a little, in that deep, rumbly way he has, and then he explained.

‘You were not meant to be here, in this time and place,’ he said. ‘Yet here you are, and so your part is to watch; to observe, to protect, but take no glory yourself. You will hold no crowns, take no spouse, father no children. You are their shield, and Narnia’s, until death takes you. So it is written.’

‘Written where, sir?’ I asked. I didn’t know whether to be proud or terrified. I was both, I suppose.

‘In the very magic of this world, child,’ he said, and laughed again, or purred maybe. I don’t know. ‘To this you must swear.’

‘To be their shield?’ I asked. I suppose I sounded doubtful. Even then - even at the very beginning, Susan, all I was really thinking of was you, of protecting you.

‘That, and all the rest,’ he said, and so I nodded and said, ‘I swear,’ because there didn’t seem anything else to do. So you see how it was. How everything that happened after was my fault.”

Silence reigns for a long moment, the only sounds the rustle of sheets as Susan sits up, hugging her knees to her chest, feeling suddenly sick. Jon’s hand traces her back, light, tentative, and she shivers.

“It’s monstrous,” she says finally, explosively. “We were just children. You couldn’t be expected to understand what that meant, to make that kind of vow in any sort of good faith.”

“But I did,” he says, the words falling like lead between them.

“That’s why,” she says, on a breath that leaves her as though she’s been hit. “Why you resisted me for so long, why you would never - why you were always so careful, when we made love.” Behind her, he sits up, his chest pressed to her back, his arms wrapped around her, and she feels him nod into her shoulder. “I thought you hated that I was a Queen, and you weren’t like the rest of us. That we weren’t truly equal to the rest of the world.”

“It was never that,” he says, his voice miserable. “You were always just Susan to me, and I loved you for that. Nothing else mattered. I just thought...after the time I died. I thought after that, it might be safe.”

She breathes, one fist clenched over her womb.

“I never meant for any of this to happen,” he says, the words muffled, a confession falling into her shoulder, seeking atonement against her skin. “I never thought that you’d be punished for what I did, or the others. Please believe that much at least, Susan.”

“I believe you,” she says, and twists to face him. “And I would do it all again, knowing everything.” Taking his face between her hands, she presses her forehead to his, their breath mingling. “He had no right. You are mine, and I am yours,” she says, fiercely. “And no one can come between that. _No one_.”

Later, she will think, _you are my God now_ , sweet blasphemy as her body clenches around him, as she loses herself to the wash of pleasure, as the world flashes gold behind her eyelids.

“Marry me,” he says to her, in the light of the next morning. “As soon as we can. Marry me again. We’ll do it right this time.”

 _There’s no Lion here to tell us no_ , she thinks, and laughs, tears shining in her eyes. “Yes.”

\--  
The house, when she returns to invite her siblings to her wedding, is oddly empty; it’s only her need to collect the cream satin dress and pearls to wear that she’s still there when the telephone rings.

The only thing she is ever certain of thereafter is that it is Lucy’s voice on the other end; garbled and maddeningly broken, but Lucy all the same.

 _Where are you_ , she remembers asking, and something that sounds like _Professor_ echoing down the line, and _Narnia_ , and _rings_.

And then, suddenly, her sister’s voice comes through, clear as a bell. “Can you come, Susan? It’s got to be right now. We’re catching the train-”

“I can’t, Lu,” she says, not even certain of what she’s refusing, but knowing she needs to, nonetheless. “I’m going to be married. To Jon. Today, if we can.” She waits, nervously, twisting the telephone cord between her fingers.

“I didn’t-” Lucy says, and then there’s a muffled sound, as though Lucy’s covering the other end, and her voice, distantly, speaking to someone else. “I’ve got to go, Su,” she says, the line crackling once more. “We’ll try, b- if I don’t see you - good lu - love-” The line goes dead, and Susan spends several long moments staring at the instrument in her hand before replacing it in its cradle, her scalp prickling, every hair standing on end.

She leaves her home for the last time, the door clicking shut behind her; quietly, reverential.

\--  
They are married for the second time early the next afternoon, with a hastily roused Sansa (“I suppose this is worth getting up before noon,” she’d groused, when Susan had rung her up) and the parish housekeeper as witnesses.

When they leave the church, happy and smiling and finally, blissfully free, there’s a stir in the streets, and the newsboy on the corner is flogging an extra edition.

That is how she reads of the British Railways accident on a street corner in her wedding dress, with her husband of fifteen minutes and nine years holding her arm; he’s all that holds her up hours later, when all her dreadful feelings coalesce into cold reality, and she learns her family is gone once more, to a place she can no longer follow.

\--  
A week later, the package arrives, and saves them both.

She is, oddly, not grieved. Not after that first, wrenching shock, for she knows what’s happened; knows it as well as she knows her own mind, and sees it reflected back in Jon’s face. “They’ve gone back,” she says, a statement rather than a question.

Jon meets her eyes, hesitating only for the briefest of seconds. “Not so much dying as…”

“Returning home,” she finishes for him, softly, looking at the last photograph she has of them all together, snapped by their mother before she’d fled the house the night of her birthday; Susan in her satin dress and jewelry, Lucy in an old jumper, Ed and Peter only half in the frame. If she squints hard enough, she finds she can pretend; pretend that they were happy, that they were at her wedding, that they’d remembered after all.

Perhaps they had, in the end.

It’s Aunt Alberta who brings her the package; Susan hasn’t been able to go back to the house, not yet, not even knowing what she feels in her heart to be true. So she’s left Alberta to make all the arrangements, guilt be damned; it gives the poor woman something to do with herself, at least.

Still, Susan takes the small, flat box with a shock, for the writing on the brown paper wrapping is Lucy’s, her neat, flowing script bringing tears to Susan’s eyes all over again. Under the wrapping, a letter sits neatly atop the box.

 _Susan & Jon_ (it says),

_If you’re reading this and you’re confused by its arrival, then we’ve gone away again, as I think we shall - you know the feeling one gets when Magic is at work, Su, and it’s all around us now, as I can’t remember feeling it before. By now, if I heard you right, you’ll be married - again! I’m sorry to have missed it (Ed says he can’t believe anyone would marry you at all, much less twice, but I think he’s only teasing). I would have liked to have met your Jon- I’ll be waiting to, whatever happens. I think maybe then I’ll remember. I’ve always wanted to trust you, but I ought to have done so sooner. I suppose we just wanted things to remain the same always, and safe._

While she reads aloud, pausing to steady her voice, Jon takes up the box, giving her a questioning look, waiting until she nods permission. Inside, when he lifts the lid, are four rings; simple things, bands set with yellow and green stones. They both recognize the power within them at once, the rings fairly throbbing with a familiar magic.

“Don’t touch them,” Susan says, in the same moment that Jon puts the box down, as carefully and hastily as if it contained a live viper. “The damned things are _humming_ ,” she mutters, before returning to the letter.

 _We mean to go back home, of course_ , Lucy’s writing continues. _You’ll have guessed that much. The rings are what Peter calls a conduit, you see - yellow to go out, and green to go in. There were two extra pairs after the lot of us had taken ours, and I can’t think that’s just a coincidence, Susan. I can’t. So I’ve left them for you - may they bring you all the happiness you deserve, and bring you back to us in the end. Both of you._

_All my love,_

_Lucy_

_PS - If by chance I’m sitting in the next room when you read this, please let’s do just forget it._

Though her eyes are full with unshed tears, Susan laughs.

“Dear Lu,” Jon murmurs. “She would think of us, even at the very end.”

“Even when she couldn’t remember you; not you as you really were,” Susan says, past the lump in her throat. _If only_ echoes through her mind; if only they’d remembered Jon. If only she’d found him again sooner, if only Aslan’s laws hadn’t banned the only love that ever mattered to her. If only.

But now - perhaps there’s a second chance, not just for her and Jon, but for all of them. She breathes deep, fixing his face in her mind once more. “Do you trust me?” she asks, reaching out, drawing the box and its bright hum closer.

“With everything,” he says, and smiles at her, and takes her hand. She remembers that, forever and always, above all else; love, and what it’s meant to her; faith, and what it’s brought her.

“Then let’s take our wedding trip.”

So they do.

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies to Eustace Scrubb, Catelyn Stark, and Peter Pevensie, all of whom I do like much better than you'd know from this story. Someone has to drive the plot.


End file.
